Ferragamo’s New Ballgame : Hard-Working Coach Says Family, Not Football, Comes First

For a few fleeting weeks in the fall of 1986, Chris Ferragamo sat at the top of the high school football world.

His unbeaten and untied Banning High team was ranked No. 1 in the country by USA Today and was on the verge of winning the mythical national title. The last team standing in the Pilots’ way was arch-rival Carson, which Banning had beaten soundly, 37-10, in league play.

“All of our guys knew we were going to win again,” Ferragamo recalled.

Unfortunately for the veteran coach and his players, things didn’t work out that way. Carson knocked Banning from its pedestal with a stunning 21-11 upset in the L.A. City Section championship game.

Thus began Ferragamo’s swift and long fall from the coaching limelight.

Spurned in his attempts to land a university coaching job, he left Banning to become coach at Harbor College in 1987. By the end of the 1988 season, he was a beaten man, frustrated by a system that he was unfamiliar with and stripped of his once-unflinching confidence.

“I thought I was a good coach, but I guess I’m not,” he said after a 20-9 loss to Compton College on Oct. 15, 1988. “This is really the low point of my life.”

Today, he is preparing for his second season as the offensive line coach at Long Beach City College. It’s not where Ferragamo, who once aspired to run his own major-college program, would have pictured himself working a decade ago.

But the part-time position has provided him with an avenue to exercise his undying love for coaching and renew his appreciation for family and friends.

“In all my years of coaching, I never spent any time with my family,” he said. “All my time was spent with other people’s children. Now I’m getting a chance to spend time with my own.”

Ferragamo, who turns 50 in December, recently became a grandfather for the first time when his daughter, Deeanna, gave birth to baby girl.

“That’s my job right now, my little granddaughter Meagan,” he said. “My wife and I get more pleasure out of that than anything.”

Does this mean that Ferragamo is content to spend the rest of his coaching days toiling in the background?

“I’m really pretty happy right now,” he said. “There’s still a little competitive fire. Some day I might like to be a head coach again. Maybe some day. I don’t know.”

Ferragamo’s competitive fires burned brightly during his 18-year reign as Banning’s coach. After enduring some lean years, Ferragamo guided the Pilots to eight L.A. City titles, including an unprecedented six in a row from 1976 to ’81. His career record was 157-36-4.

He was the toast of Wilmington, the blue-collar city where he grew up and helped put on the map through Banning’s successes on the football field.

“There were times when Chris could have run for mayor of Wilmington,” said Harbor College Athletic Director Jim O’Brien.

Ferragamo believed that coaching a nationally recognized high school team would lead to a job at a university or an established community college. But he never got beyond an audition. Stanford, USC and El Camino College were among the schools that turned him down.

“In essence, what they were saying was that I didn’t have enough college coaching experience,” he said. “So I took the Harbor College job.”

Others, though, said Ferragamo’s downfall was an overbearing attitude that turned off administrators and coaches at other schools.

“There was definitely an arrogant side to him,” said one college coach.

Ferragamo admitted that he may have come on too strong in interviews. Twice he applied for the head job at El Camino College, but was passed over for Jack Reilly in 1982 and John Featherstone in 1985.

“I could have got the El Camino job,” he said. “But I think they figured I was too dominant a personality.

“I’m a takeover person. If I’m in a group, I have a tendency to be the guy that wants to direct and organize everything. It’s just inside me, that’s what makes me go.”

Then there was the issue of his ability as a coach. Despite his success at Banning, some questioned if Ferragamo could cut it on the college level. That might have been answered during his two-year stint at Harbor College, where his teams were a dismal 3-17-1, including 1-10 in 1988.

It has led some to believe that Ferragamo excelled at Banning because he had great talent--players such as Freeman McNeil, Stanley Wilson and Jamelle Holieway--and not because he was great with X’s and O’s.

Others voice a more sympathetic opinion.

“I think it’s unfortunate what’s happened in his coaching career, because nobody likes to see what he’s gone through,” said Featherstone, coach of the successful El Camino program. “The coaching fraternity is a tough fraternity. You’ve got to produce and you’ve got to win or, unfortunately, you are looked upon as a loser. Chris isn’t a loser. He just got caught in a tough situation at Harbor for a couple of years.”

Ferragamo can handle the criticism. In evaluating his abilities, he graded himself as a good motivator and average tactician.

“The biggest thing I have going for me is that I’m a motivator,” he said. “I would take a kid who was unmotivated and try to get him jacked up to play ball. That was my forte. I wasn’t a great coach, but I was good doing that.”

Although Ferragamo has no regrets, it’s clear that his descent as a coach began when he took over the football program at Harbor College.

The Seahawks have struggled for years to compete under the long shadow of neighboring El Camino College, which regularly attracts the best high school players in the South Bay because of its winning tradition, seasoned coaching staff and excellent facilities.

Ferragamo, though, believed his reputation at Banning would help him draw top-notch players to Harbor. He was wrong.

“I figured I could draw the good kids, but it was just the opposite,” he said. “I didn’t get one Banning player that first year, not one. I guess the kids didn’t like me. It was very disillusioning.”

Banning Coach Joe Dominguez, who served under Ferragamo for 12 seasons as the offensive coordinator at Banning and one year at Harbor, offered another viewpoint.

“When a kid leaves high school, he has aspirations of playing further at the Division I level,” Dominguez said. “Those two years at a junior college are very important to him. He doesn’t want to experiment. He wants to go to a known program where he’s going to get exposure.”

There were other problems. Before the 1987 season, Ferragamo unknowingly violated a recruiting rule by sending letters to high school coaches outside of Harbor’s district. The state placed him on probation for a year, during which time Harbor’s recruiting was monitored.

“It was embarrassing to our administrators,” said O’Brien, the Harbor athletic director. “They didn’t like it at all.”

Harbor was 2-7-1 in Ferragamo’s first year. It was his worst season as coach since Banning was 1-7 in the 1972, the year after quarterback Vince Ferragamo, Chris’ youngest brother, graduated before going on to play for Nebraska and the Rams.

But if Ferragamo’s first year at Harbor was rough, 1988 was a nightmare.

Again, the season began with a coaching faux pas. Before Harbor played El Camino, Ferragamo sent an assistant coach, John Brown, to watch the Warriors run through an inter-squad scrimmage, a violation of scouting practices.

When Featherstone spotted Brown taking notes in the stands at El Camino’s Murdock Stadium, he confronted Brown, took the notebook out of his hands and told him to leave.

“It was an isolated incident,” Featherstone said. “I don’t think Chris was familiar with the rules, and I don’t think John Brown understood, either. They both apologized.”

But the incident resulted in bad publicity for Ferragamo and Harbor. And the publicity grew worse.

The Seahawks were not merely losing, they were losing ugly. In a 47-10 defeat at Bakersfield College, four Harbor players were ejected for fighting and assistant coach Jim True, Ferragamo’s right-hand man, was suspended for shoving a trainer over a disagreement on how to treat an injured player.

Ferragamo doesn’t deny that the team had discipline problems.

“The problem was that I couldn’t get the kids that were disciplined to come there,” he said. “I got kids that were undisciplined. That’s the only thing I could get. I had to play with whatever I had. If I kicked off all the kids on my team that were undisciplined, I wouldn’t have had anybody left.”

In retrospect, Ferragamo realizes the situation grew worse because he was an off-campus coach. A science teacher at Banning for 28 years, he wasn’t at Harbor during the day to address the needs of his players.

Said Dominguez: “If you don’t get there until an hour before practice, you can’t solve those problems.”

The failure of Harbor’s program to take off under Ferragamo came as a great surprise and disappointment to O’Brien.

“With his attitude and charisma, I thought he would have the kids storming in,” he said. “We had a good turnout of kids the first year, but the key was that so many left. It seemed like we were starting over every year.”

O’Brien, coach of Harbor’s state champion baseball team, said Ferragamo might have underestimated the competitiveness of community college athletics. Or, as one coach put it, Ferragamo suffered from “visions of grandeur.”

Among the criticisms was that he scheduled non-conference games with teams that were far superior to Harbor, such as El Camino and Taft.

“Chris came in with really big ideas,” O’Brien said. “He almost talked me into building a bigger stadium. He had me convinced that place was going to be filled up. Well, if you came to our games, you know we didn’t need a bigger stadium. Things didn’t work out like he had pictured.”

O’Brien, though, admired Ferragamo’s work ethic.

“I’ve never seen a guy who worked any harder than he did,” he said. “I have great respect for Chris. He has a lot of energy. If he were a salesman, he would make a million dollars. He has that gleam in his eye.”

But the gleam turned to a glaze after two years at Harbor. After the 1988 season, Ferragamo withdrew his name from a list of candidates who had applied for a temporary full-time position in the athletic department, a job earmarked by O’Brien for the football coach. With the job guaranteed for only a year, Ferragamo felt he couldn’t afford to leave his teaching position at Banning.

Several weeks later, Don Weems, a former assistant coach at Santa Monica College and Nevada-Las Vegas, was hired as coach.

Not everyone was pleased with the way Harbor handled the situation.

“I think you have to give a coach a certain amount of time to settle in and find out what needs to be done,” Dominguez said. “I don’t think Harbor was patient enough with him. Sometimes a coach tends to get blamed for things that are out of his control.”

Dominguez pointed out that two-thirds of Ferragamo’s staff left Harbor after the 1987 season to return to Banning, where Dominguez was chosen to replace John Hazelton as head coach. “I’m sure that hurt,” he said.

But Ferragamo offered no excuses.

He gave this appraisal of his experience at Harbor after Weems was named coach in February, 1989: “I thought it would take a year or so to build the program. But I realize now that it takes time. I would need about five years to do it. I guess I just wasn’t as knowledgeable about the area and the system as I thought.”

Harbor’s loss became Long Beach’s gain.

Without a coaching job for the first time since 1963, Ferragamo got a call in the summer of 1989 from Long Beach City College Coach Wil Shaw, asking him to join the Viking staff as the offensive line coach.

“He didn’t put any pressure on me,” said Ferragamo, a former All-Marine League center at Banning. “Had he done that, I wouldn’t be there. I found a home over there, a little niche.”

In his first year at Long Beach, the Vikings were 4-6.

Some believed Ferragamo would return to Banning after leaving Harbor. But he has no immediate plans to return to the high school game.

“I never regret leaving Banning,” he said. “I enjoyed all my years of coaching there, with Dominguez and (defensive coordinator) Rocky Garibay and those guys, because they were great. Those are memories I cherish a lot. But the reason I left is because I wanted new horizons in coaching. I’ve been to Harbor and now I’m at Long Beach City. I’ve seen what’s going on.”

Dominguez said he never asked Ferragamo to join his staff at Banning.

“I have so much respect for Chris, I feel it would have been a put-down for me to offer him a job,” he said. “I couldn’t have done that.”

Shaw, however, had no qualms about asking Ferragamo to help out.

“I was hoping he would be receptive, and he was,” said Shaw, entering his seventh season as coach at Long Beach. “It has worked out well. He’s a loyal, hard-working coach. He’s been very successful, and he brings that with him.”

Ferragamo will have the added pleasure this season of coaching his nephew, Greg Sorensen, a 6-3, 260-pound freshman center from Los Alamitos High.

“He’s going to be an All-American,” said his proud uncle.

Sorensen is the third relative Ferragamo has coached. His brother Vince and his eldest son, Chris Jr. (class of ‘80), were both quarterbacks at Banning.

One of the greatest joys in Ferragamo’s life is his son, Marcus. The youngest of his three children will celebrate his 21st birthday Monday.

At 8, Marcus developed a brain tumor that rendered him legally blind and stunted his coordination and growth.

But, like his father, Marcus has persevered through trying times.

“He’s a miracle kid,” Ferragamo said. “He made it. I spend as much time as I can with him.”

Together, father and son operate a one-hour photo store in Marina del Rey. The business takes up a great deal of Ferragamo’s time, but it is time gladly spent away from the classroom and football field.

After years of trying to climb the coaching ladder, Ferragamo has taken a step back and realized there are other things in life than winning games and building football programs.

“Now that I look back at head coaching, it’s an awful lot of hard work,” he said. “I may not want to put in that kind of time again. All coaches go through the same thing. You neglect your own family for your job.”

That includes his wife of 30 years, Marlene, a consummate football widow.

“She’s much happier now,” Ferragamo said.

And, in a lot of ways, so is her husband.